The Rails Edge: Quotes and Notes

Noel Rappin, Monday, August 27, 2007 @ 11:34 am

Last week I attended Pragmatic Studio’s “The Rails Edge” conference in
Skokie, IL.  I’m going to do a couple of posts on this. For the
first post, I thought I’d present some of the best quotes that I noted from the speakers
over the three days.

“Java is the blunt scissors of programming”
  — Dave Thomas, Pragmatic Dave himself, in a talk about Metaprogramming Ruby, and alluding to the way Java was explicitly designed to prevent a programmer from changing the program context..

But, if a Ruby programmer can change existing classes, can’t you shoot
yourself in the foot? That’s not a Ruby problem…

“That’s a people problem. It’s solved by four feet of rubber hose in the car park”
  — Dave Thomas, who presumably was kidding. Kind of.

Later…

“The key to metaprogramming is understanding self. Isn’t that the key to life”
  — Dave Thomas, exploring the parallels between metaprogramming and metaphysics.

Moving on…

“I hate using the words ‘best practice’”
  — Chad Fowler

“Unless you understand the SQL code that Rails produces, your app will suck.”
  — Chad Fowler

“Metaprogramming + DSLs is the Ruby equivalent of Design Patterns in the Java world”
  — Chad Fowler. Fowler’s point here was more about the buzz and hype, just like there was a time in the early 2000s when every Java programmer wanted Design Patterns whether or not they were needed, Fowler sees a similar rush to add DSLs to Ruby programs.

“Model/View/Controller apps are like GOTO for the web”
  — Avi Bryant, quoted by Fowler.

In general, the shortcomings of Rails view support were an ongoing theme,

“I think it’s sad that Rails is still using ERB”
  — Chad Fowler

One of the best talks was by Ezra Zygmuntowicz about Rails deployment. The
talk was introduced thusly:

“Rails deployment made you feel dumb. It was hard and then it still didn’t work”
  — Mike Clark. To be clear, Clark was emphasizing the past tense in that statement.

Zygmuntowicz, quickly moved to establish his credentials…

“I’m running, like 7000 Mongrels right now”
 
— Ezra Zygmuntowicz

Later, Justin Ghetland presented on JRuby, proclaiming that it has

“The elegance of Java, the speed of Ruby”
  — Justin Gehtland

“In order to win companies need to unleash the creativity of open source, without fetters”
 
— Justin Gehtland, discussing the difference between Sun’s handling of JRuby and Microsoft’s handling of IronRuby

“Any time you try to impose a hierarchical order on the world, you’re bound to be disappointed”
  — Dave Thomas, commenting from the stands during a later talk on REST and its strengths and weaknesses

One of my favorite talks was from Stuart Halloway about Agile, Enterprise,
Ruby, and Rails. A boatload of good quotes here, I’m going to skim off
my favorites.

“The right process is always ‘not quite enough process’”
  — Stuart Halloway

Stuart continued by saying that if you are using note cards for tasks and
everybody kind of things that maybe they should use an Excel spreadsheet,
then you’re probably in the right place, but if it’s causing real pain,
you need to change.

“Do the dumbest, simplest thing that almost works”
  — Stuart Halloway, on process

Dave Thomas chimed in from the cheap seats…

“The traditional view, with sixteen pounds of documentation, introduces a single point of failure in the process, understanding the problem domain”
  — Dave Thomas

“Getting a specification involves bullying the customer”
  — Dave Thomas

Halloway then talked about enterprise development:

“What makes something enterprise? My favorite definition is to add two zeros at the end of the price”
  — Stuart Halloway

Halloway went on to justify the increased cost because of the increased
amount of security and specification that an enterprise customer needs.

“What does scalable mean? [Pause. Nobody answers.] Ha. Ha. Rails programmers
  don’t know what scalable means”
  — Stuart Halloway

The definition of scalable Halloway used was a linear increase in complexity
as size increases. Therefore:

“Rails is slow. But it’s scalable.”
  — Stuart Halloway

Pragmatic Dave chimed in from the front row:

“Scalable is more important to a one-man shop than to an enterprise.
  An enterprise isn’t going to quadruple in size overnight”
  — Dave Thomas

Jumping ahead here, Halloway made the following observation

“If programmers, on average, were able to write parsers and compilers, Ruby on Rails would not have taken off”
  — Stuart Halloway

The point being that if programmers were able to write there own DSL’s, then
they wouldn’t need Rails’ support for doing so.

Halloway then continued to talk about Agile process, advocating 100% code
coverage all the time.

“I don’t worry about performance until I have accurate, customer-verified code”
  — Stuart Halloway

“Making something fast too early is a classic symptom of somebody who wants an opaque development process”
  — Stuart Halloway

Great talk. I’ll have more to say about it in a later post, I think.

Later on, there was a big focus on testing, especially testing Rails views.

“If you can’t test it, then it’s not a beautiful design. If you can’t test it, it doesn’t exist”
  — David Chelimsky, summing up the prevailing sentiment

“I’m pairing with 130 people. That’s promiscuous programming, that’s what that is”
  — Dave Thomas, in a talk about buried treasures in Rails, as the entire room is correcting his typos

“We have four levels of indirection. We should be able to solve everything”
  — Justin again, talking about the layers between RJS code and something actually happening in a browser.

That’s the best of the quotes. Next post will be about some of the themes
and discussions of the conference.

agile ajax

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